Can Mitt Romney Recover the Soul of Republican Foreign Policy?

The presidential candidate's party, after a long tradition of strong foreign policy, finds itself lost and divided. Can Romney reunite it, or will neoconservatism dominate by default?

Mitt Romney walks past an American flag on his way to a meeting with Hispanic business owners in Tempe, Arizona. (AP)

Americans will enter voting booths in November fixated on a sputtering domestic
economy, but they will exit having elected the single most influential
player on the world stage. That reflects a paradox of American power: a
generally inward-looking electorate selects a leader with only scant
attention to his foreign policies or international experience, and yet
that person's actions undoubtedly will shape the course of global
events. And into the center of that paradox walks the enigma that is
Mitt Romney.

Given his limited foreign-policy experience and counterpuncher's
strategy of defining himself primarily as what his opponent is not, it's
difficult to know just what Romney's worldview is. His image as a
moderate former Republican governor from the Northeast with a successful
background in international business suggests a likely comfort level
with the liberal-internationalist or moderate realist traditions of the
Republican Party.

Yet as a candidate courting his party's conservative base, Romney has
issued foreign-policy pronouncements with a harder line. He says his
administration would align closely with Israel, view Russia as the
United States' primary geostrategic foe and label China as a currency
manipulator. The population of terrorist suspects at the Guantánamo Bay
military prison might double, and "enhanced interrogation techniques"
such as waterboarding could return to the counterterrorism toolbox. A
Romney administration purportedly would increase defense spending and
bolster rather than shrink the size of the U.S. military. There would be
no diplomacy with Iran, which would be enjoined to abandon its
nuclear-weapons ambitions or else. U.S. military forces would remain in
Afghanistan until the Taliban is defeated decisively.

How Romney would balance such an aggressive foreign-affairs and
national-security agenda with his pledge to cut taxes across the board
and address a towering debt crisis remains an open question.

In truth, the prism of a presidential-election campaign offers a
notoriously unreliable view of America's role in the world. Through this
lens, the lands beyond our shores appear in broad strokes that lack
detail and color. There is only black and white, friend and foe, and the
president of the United States appears to have the power to magically
realign the international landscape. Such a distorted viewfinder is not
only imperfect for navigating the shoals of geopolitics but also a poor
predictor of any president's ultimate path.

And yet, if the aperture is widened to include historical context and
personal biography, a rigorous campaign may at least suggest the
lodestar that a president will follow in charting an unpredictable
course. The choice of a candidate provides insights as to which
foreign-policy school of thought is ascendant within the party. The
background of the candidate and his key foreign-policy and
national-security advisers provides further pieces of the puzzle.

In emerging as the Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney
vanquished primary opponents representing venerable strains of GOP
thinking. Representative Ron Paul, the libertarian from Texas, was the
strongest voice for a more isolationist foreign policy. Former senator
Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania gave the most authentic voice to the
populist nationalism of the Tea Party movement. Former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich most closely aligned with the neoconservatives who were
ascendant in George W. Bush's first term with their staunch support for
the Israeli Right and disdain for talking with distasteful adversaries.
Gingrich blasted the Obama administration for being "wrong on Iran,
wrong on the Muslim Brotherhood [and] wrong on Hezbollah." Former
governor Jon Huntsman of Utah, former ambassador to China, stood in for
the realist or liberal-internationalist wing of the party that dominated
the George H. W. Bush administration.

Romney must reconcile these competing camps and weave their various
policies and rhetorical positions into a coherent foreign-policy
narrative. His task is complicated because the old Republican orthodoxy
of staunch anticommunism and a strong defense was upended at the Cold
War's end, and George W. Bush's Iraq invasion still generates
controversy and dissention within the party. Beyond that, there are the
added challenges of the country's deep partisan divide and political
dysfunction, as well as a shifting global landscape.

Georgetown University's Charles Kupchan notes that "the old Cold War
consensus has disappeared," which has put the Republican Party in "a
period of great turmoil in terms of its foreign policy." Kupchan, author
of No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn,
adds that the country finds itself searching for a proper role "in a
world that is changing more fundamentally than at any time since the
1800s." Thus, the Republican Party is being pulled not only between
liberal internationalists and neoconservatives but also by rank-and-file
Republicans who identify with the Tea Party and favor a more restrained
American role in the world. "After a decade of war, the Great Recession
and the growth of a towering deficit, that view resonates with a large
number of weary Republican voters," Kupchan said in an interview.
"Meanwhile, we as a country are becoming as polarized on matters of
foreign policy as we are on domestic issues, and that hasn't happened
since before World War II."

To understand the foreign-policy narrative Mitt Romney is attempting
to articulate, it's important to grasp the threads of foreign-policy
thought that he and the campaign are drawing on. In his 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World,
historian Walter Russell Mead traced those threads back to their
historical antecedents to show that today's arguments have a venerable
history.

Republican realists and liberal internationalists, most notably
represented by former stalwarts Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Brent
Scowcroft and Colin Powell, harken back to Alexander Hamilton, champion
of a strong and internationally engaged federal government.
Neoisolationists and libertarians such as Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul,
wary of international entanglements, trace their philosophy to Thomas
Jefferson's belief in small government, states' rights and the avoidance
of "entangling alliances." Neoconservatives share the idealism of
President Woodrow Wilson's values-based foreign policy and his belief
that America has a special calling to fight on behalf of liberty and
democracy, though they evince little of Wilson's deference to
international institutions. The Tea Party movement follows in the
tradition of Andrew Jackson, the populist champion of "American
exceptionalism" who believed in limited government and personified a
nationalistic "don't tread on me" pugnacity.

While the Republican worldview is an amalgam of these philosophies,
at different periods in the nation's history events have conspired to
advance some of them over others, at times dramatically reshaping the
party's dominant narrative.

After the horrific carnage of World War I, for instance, Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge was so furious at President Woodrow Wilson that he led
the fight to block America's entry into the League of Nations, a
precursor of the United Nations. The next year, Republican presidential
nominee Warren G. Harding was elected on the rallying cry of a "return
to normalcy," which meant domestic issues and homeland defense over
Wilson's democratic evangelism. By the 1930s, with Franklin D. Roosevelt
in the White House and the GOP in the opposition, "normalcy" for
Republicans meant support for the Neutrality Act of 1935, designed to
keep the United States out of war in Europe.

The 1952 presidential election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower,
with the Cold War in full swing, elevated the realists and
internationalists, setting the Republican Party back on the path of
American engagement and global leadership. A bipartisan Cold War
consensus had emerged in support of an outsized American role in
countering communism around the world. Nearly all of the post-World War
II building blocks designed to undergird the "American Century" passed
with bipartisan congressional support--creation of the United Nations and
NATO; establishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund;
and passage of the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe.

President Richard Nixon's administration was another high-water line
for the realists, revealed in his ideologically flexible outreach to
Communist China. Nixon's top foreign-policy hand, Henry Kissinger, first
national-security adviser and then secretary of state, was an
über-realist who believed in a carefully maintained balance of power
among global powers. That view held that it was in the United States'
interest to gain legitimacy by leading through the architecture of
multilateral institutions, alliances and treaties that the nation so
painstakingly constructed after World War II. Given the obvious
advantages that accrued to the United States under that system, the
realists naturally embraced a status quo worldview that prized
stability.

But Democrats, traumatized by the Vietnam War and energized by the
antiwar movement, entered into their own isolationist phase during the
1970s, characterized by presidential candidate George McGovern's "Come
Home, America" platform in 1972 and President Jimmy Carter's defense
cutbacks and threats to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea. But after
the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the pendulum of politics began to swing in a new direction
that would rewrite the Republican narrative.

After a decade of trauma -- defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil
embargo, hyperinflation, Soviet expansionism, and the Iranian hostage
crisis -- Ronald Reagan's 1980 election heralded another inflection point
for Republican foreign policy. Reagan's administration included a number
of senior officials comfortable in the realist wing of the party,
including Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger.

But Reagan's party also picked up political refugees from the Henry
"Scoop" Jackson wing of the Democratic Party disillusioned with their
party's antiwar stance and flirtation with isolationism. Though moderate
or liberal on domestic issues, they were fervently anticommunist and
pro-defense. These included former Jackson staffer Richard Perle, who
became an influential assistant secretary of defense, as well as Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations.

For these neoconservatives, their seminal professional experience was
Reagan's decision to discard détente with the Soviet Union in favor of a
more confrontational approach. His foreign-policy ideology could be
seen in the largest peacetime defense buildup in American history,
support for anticommunist proxies in Central America and Africa, his
description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and his spirited
demand in Berlin that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall." This
neoconservative outlook generally stood for the values-based proposition
that U.S. military power should be unsurpassed and largely
unconstrained in confronting and defeating (rather than accommodating)
evil empires and nations, the better to advance the march of democracy.
Neoconservatives also have a famously close affinity for Israel as a
scrappy democracy amid autocracies.

In adopting a more confrontational stance toward the Soviet Union and
engaging it in an arms buildup that bankrupted Moscow into submission,
Reagan was the proverbial "right leader at the right time." A strong
case can be and has been made that he deserves much credit for winning
the Cold War. Even by his own second term, however, Reagan had moderated
his foreign policy to the extent of proposing a world without nuclear
weapons to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in
1986 (a suggestion that appalled true neoconservatives such as Perle).
Reagan's proxy war also came back to haunt him in the form of the
Iran-contra affair, the worst scandal of his Oval Office years.

By the time Vice President George H. W. Bush was elected president in
1988, more moderate internationalists and realists emerged once again
in the embodiment of James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs who had served as Reagan's
national-security adviser. Bush 41 himself had a résumé right out of the
liberal-internationalist playbook--northeastern patrician, Ivy Leaguer,
successful in business, former envoy to China, head of the CIA and vice
president.

The Bush team engineered a peaceful end to the Cold War and a soft
landing for a disintegrating Soviet empire; the successful reunification
of Germany; and a victorious Persian Gulf War to oust Iraqi forces from
Kuwait. It was an impressive foreign-policy trifecta, and the Bush team
used the momentum to pursue a "new world order" in which the
twentieth-century scourge of state-on-state aggression would be
consigned to history and Israel would be pressured to reach a two-state
solution to its conflict with the Palestinians to stabilize the Middle
East.

But back home, amid recession, a weary public was looking for a
"peace dividend" and listening to an upstart Democrat from the baby boom
generation who argued that "it's the economy, stupid." Because the Cold
War and opposition to communist tyranny had energized Republicans so
intensely, the GOP was set adrift by the disappearance of an overarching
Soviet threat. The 1992 defeat of George H. W. Bush by Democrat Bill
Clinton, a former southern governor with little international
experience, certainly heightened that sense of confusion. Throughout the
1990s, Democrats searching for their own foreign-policy narrative in a
transformed world would have the benefit of one of their own in the
White House, riding herd over a fractious caucus and controlling the
most powerful levers in foreign affairs. Clinton's narrative held that
America's role in the world was still that of the "indispensable nation"
leading like-minded countries in collective actions against common
threats. He led NATO into the Balkans, proposed landmark arms-control
agreements and tried to reach a peaceful settlement to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Camp David.

Clinton's election and Newt Gingrich's counterwave "Republican
revolution" of 1994 represented a generational passing of the torch. The
World War II generation, bedrock of the Cold War consensus, began
passing from the scene. In its place rose the baby boom politicians who
never had reconciled deep partisan ruptures over the 1960s
counterculture revolution and Vietnam. Deep foreign-policy disagreements
soon seeped into the hyperpartisan catfight of Washington politics.

The 1994 GOP revolution also heralded a seismic shift in the domestic
political landscape. The party had waned in those areas of the country
that represented the liberal-internationalist tradition--the Northeast,
West Coast and upper Midwest. The post-1994 party reflected the views of
the Deep South and Mountain West, fertile ground for Jacksonian "don't
tread on me" nationalism as well as unilateral and isolationist
impulses.

Not surprisingly, this younger generation of Republican politicians
was committed to shrinking the size of government, even if that meant a
smaller role for the United States overseas. Gingrich's poll-tested
"Contract with America" hardly mentioned foreign policy or national
security, other than supporting a national missile-defense system
advocated by Reagan.

For a time in the 1990s, the Republican Party flirted with
isolationism, the theme of former Republican presidential candidate
Patrick Buchanan's book A Republic, Not an Empire. Echoing
isolationists from the 1930s, it argued that the United States need not
have been drawn into World War II. Though that made the book
controversial, Buchanan's essential argument resonated strongly with
many of the new southern Republican leaders who rode Gingrich's
revolution to Washington or to the chairmanships of key congressional
committees. Arrogant U.S. foreign-policy elites had overcommitted
America to wars in regions where it had no vital interests, Buchanan
argued, and betrayed U.S. sovereignty by tying its fortunes to agencies
of "an embryonic world government" such as the UN, WTO and IMF.

These Republicans thus criticized Clinton's nation-building
interventions in Bosnia and Haiti as international social work. After
aligning with powerful committee chairmen such as Jesse Helms, chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Republican
revolutionaries pushed for withholding dues from the UN, cutting State
Department funding and reducing foreign aid. Republicans also disavowed
NATO's air war over Kosovo as "Clinton's war," and in 1999 the
Republican Senate defeated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The dominant narrative offered by the Republican revolutionaries
about America's rightful role in the world probably hewed closest to
Andrew Jackson's populist nationalism. Philosophically, they were
suspicious of the federal government and of multilateral engagement that
could impinge on U.S. sovereignty, whether expressed in international
treaties or in undue deference to the UN.

But this minimalist outlook was opposed by the neoconservatives. In
1999, Senate Republicans voted to oppose NATO airstrikes in Kosovo, even
while the Republican House was impeaching the president. The editors of
the Weekly Standard, an influential neoconservative journal,
came to Clinton's defense. "As a result of that vote, and of the
neo-isolationist arguments that leading Republicans made to support
their position, Republican foreign policy is now mired in pathetic
incoherence," the editors wrote. "Is this the party of Reagan or the
party of [Patrick] Buchanan?"

After the 2000 election, George W. Bush had to confront that
question. In building his foreign-policy and national-security teams,
Bush drew from each of the party's competing foreign-policy camps. Most
prominently standing in for the hard-line nationalists were Vice
President Dick Cheney, a Wyoming native whose mild demeanor belied a
bone-deep conservatism, and John Bolton, a favorite of Jesse Helms who
served under Bush as a top arms-control official at the State Department
and later as ambassador to the United Nations. (He was so openly
disdainful of both arms control and the world body that the Senate
refused to confirm him as ambassador, and he was seated under a recess
appointment.) The internationalists were represented at the State
Department through Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage and State Department policy head Richard Haass.

But the Bush administration also was stocked with leading
neoconservative lights, most notably Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, considered an intellectual high priest among
neoconservatives; Pentagon number-three Douglas Feith, a former protégé
of Richard Perle; National Security Council official Zalmay Khalilzad
and Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, both former Wolfowitz
protégés; and Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board.

No one knows how Bush might have used the dynamic tension between
those camps to forge a new Republican narrative. After the national
trauma of 9/11, his foreign policy quickly emerged as an alliance of the
hard-line nationalists and neoconservatives with the rapid
marginalization of Powell and the internationalists. Bush himself
revealed this in his January 2002 State of the Union address, in which
he declared that the war on terrorism would be global and go far beyond
targeting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Evoking an image of America anointed
by God to confront a spreading evil around the world, preemptively and
unilaterally if need be, Bush also put nations seeking weapons of mass
destruction (an "axis of evil" that included North Korea, Iraq and Iran)
directly in the U.S. crosshairs.

While Bush's speech played well in the U.S. heartland, it struck much
of the world as messianic and menacing. The American superpower, fresh
from "victory" in Afghanistan, now was brandishing its sword at
rejectionist nations, with almost no consultation with allies or
coalition partners. The Bush neoconservatives believed that American
ideals and the U.S. military would not just contain or deter but
decisively defeat Islamic extremism, the spread of weapons of mass
destruction and the radical states that nourished those scourges. From
that vision flowed other elements of the Bush doctrine: a focus on
coercion and regime change, preventive war and unilateral action masked
by ad hoc "coalitions of the willing."

As former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told me at
the time, "After victory in the Cold War, a number of 'grand visions'
competed conceptually for preeminence in the United States, and one of
them was the neoconservative vision. President Bush adopted their
worldview."

This worldview yielded a costly and unpopular preventive war in Iraq,
the spread of anti-Americanism worldwide and a pronounced decline of
trust in the quality of U.S. leadership. For perhaps the first time in
the modern era, even close U.S. allies came to distrust American
motives. The eventual result was that top neoconservatives and
hard-liners who stoked the ideological fires and steered foreign policy
in the first Bush term, winning the president to their cause in the
process, were shown the door during his second term (including Paul
Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and Donald
Rumsfeld).

The second Bush term was driven by the more cautious and moderate
vision of Republican realists and liberal internationalists, most
notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates. They attempted to mend ties with bruised Western allies,
engaged in negotiations even with "evil regimes" in North Korea and
Iran, and reinserted the United States into the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict as a mediator. This won the derision of neoconservatives. "What
we've seen is a real wavering on the principles that were articulated
throughout the first term, when Bush seemed to be a truly revolutionary
figure," Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a
Washington think tank and intellectual home to many neoconservatives,
told me at the time.

Now Mitt Romney must reconcile the tensions between these competing
foreign-policy camps. That will require, first, the rendering of a
verdict on the Bush years. The neoconservatives who dominated Bush's
first term, unrepentant about the Iraq War, continue to argue for
greater American assertiveness against adversaries such as Iran and
military support for democratic revolutions in places such as Libya and
Syria. Tea Party hard-liners remain suspicious of entangling alliances,
arms-control treaties and institutions of global governance such as the
United Nations, while the evangelicals among them have a visceral
connection to the Israeli Right.

"The ghost of the Cold War consensus that supported U.S. leadership
of a global, commercial order has passed," says Walter Russell Mead,
"and that has created disarray in U.S. foreign policy in general and a
civil war in the Republican Party in particular." The GOP's populist
energy now comes from people who want the United States to stop being
the world's policeman and social worker, focusing instead on fixing
what's broken at home. Mead sees the party factions competing to enlist
the Jacksonian tea partiers as foot soldiers in their particular causes.
He adds:

My reading of the popular psychology is that the
neoconservatives will win that competition by providing the
foreign-policy strategy and political language that attracts very
threat-sensitive Jacksonian populists. If I'm right, the Republican
foreign policy that emerges from this election will favor global
engagement, assertive interactions in the Middle East and a large
military budget.

In other words, the tea partiers will back the neoconservative
worldview that dominated the first Bush term. What is perhaps most
notable about that shift, however, is the degree to which more moderate
Republican realists and liberal internationalists feel increasingly
marginalized in a party that continues to move markedly to the right.

Brent Scowcroft, a lifelong Republican who served in the Gerald Ford
and Bush 41 presidencies, notes that there always have been strident
people in American politics, but in the past there were a greater number
willing to aim for cooperation and compromise. Now his party has
embraced the Newt Gingrich approach of "rote opposition and 'just say
no,'" says Scowcroft, who calls this approach "grossly dysfunctional."
He adds, "That makes it very hard for any president to lead
internationally."

Romney's task of articulating a Republican foreign-policy narrative
is complicated also by Obama's deftness in occupying the middle ground
of liberal internationalism, most obviously evidenced by his decision to
keep Robert Gates on as defense secretary. Thus, some of his
foreign-policy initiatives in the realms of nonproliferation and Middle
East peacemaking have been supported by moderate Republicans, including
Scowcroft, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Richard Lugar, Gates, and Chuck Hagel.

To draw clear distinctions with the Obama record, Romney has attacked
the president from the right while embracing Ronald Reagan's "peace
through strength" rhetoric. That explains both Romney's endorsement of
major increases in defense spending and the size of the military even as
the nation ends two ground wars and his criticism of Obama as weak and
conciliatory toward adversaries.

In Romney's narrative, Obama's outreach to the Islamic world and talk
about past U.S. missteps--supporting autocrats in Muslim countries or
adopting counter-terrorism policies that ran "contrary to our
ideals"--amounts to apologizing for America's greatness. "Never before in
American history has its president gone before so many foreign
audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds," Romney wrote in
his 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. "It
is his way of signaling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that
their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at
least in part, understandable."

Romney has focused his most intense criticism at Obama's pressure on
Israel to end settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East
Jerusalem as a way to bring Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
Successive Democratic and Republican administrations going back decades
have opposed settlements, but Romney argues that Obama's approach
amounts to "[throwing] Israel under the bus." The clear message, driven
home by Romney's visit to Israel this summer in his sole overseas trip
of the campaign, is that Romney would back Israel unconditionally and
adopt the "hands-off" approach to the Middle East peace process that
George W. Bush took in his first term.

Regarding great-power relations, Romney also has taken a hard line,
criticizing the Obama administration's "reset" in relations with Moscow
and tolerance of China's unfair trade practices. "Russia, this is,
without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every
cause for the world's worst actors," Romney told CNN. And Romney has
threatened to label Beijing a "currency manipulator" on his first day in
office if the communist regime continues to refuse to float its
currency against the dollar. "If you are not willing to stand up to
China, you will get run over by China, and that's what's happened for
twenty years," Romney said.

Romney's surrogates also criticize Obama's attempts to build
international consensus for action at the United Nations as
multilateralism run amok, too often tying America's hands. They accuse
the administration of "leading from behind" in the NATO operation to
oust Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi, belittle its willingness to negotiate
with adversaries such as Syria and Iran, and deride its attempts to
close the Guantánamo Bay prison as being soft on terrorism.

"Like Ronald Reagan, Governor Romney believes that America and the
world are better off when the United States leads from a position of
unchallenged strength, and that our values should animate our foreign
policy," former ambassador Richard Williamson, a foreign-policy adviser
to Romney, said in an interview. "Contrast that to President Obama's
preference for 'leading from behind,' for engagement for engagement's
sake, and his undue deference to multilateralism that has compromised
U.S. policies towards Syria, Iran and North Korea."

Romney's critique has a common theme: Obama's outreach to global
constituencies, and embrace of a multilateral worldview, represent a
turning away from "American exceptionalism," or the notion that the
United States embodies a unique set of values, principles and attributes
that make it a beacon of democracy and the natural global leader. "I
believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in
the world," Romney said at the Citadel last year. "Not exceptional, as
the President has derisively said, in the way that the British think
Great Britain is exceptional or the Greeks think Greece is exceptional.
In Barack Obama's profoundly mistaken view, there is nothing unique
about the United States." He adds, "If you do not want America to be the
strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that
President today."

Of course, one danger of such a hard-line foreign-policy narrative is
that it takes lessons from the Reagan era out of time and context.
Reagan burdened the country with high levels of debt, for instance, to
overwhelm the monolithic threat of the Soviet Union. That gamble paid
off with the Soviet collapse. Today, by contrast, both the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs and secretary of defense argue persuasively that the
United States' crippling debt is the number one national-security threat
to the nation. Yet when Obama proposed creating a bipartisan
deficit-reduction commission whose hard medicine would be guaranteed an
up-or-down vote in Congress, a number of Republicans who had previously
supported the idea changed positions to thwart the president, a clear
indication that a post-Cold War consensus for addressing the nation's
most pressing problems remains elusive.

There also is a danger that the Romney narrative may remind voters
less of Ronald Reagan than of George W. Bush, and it could lead to a
repeat of Bush's controversial first-term mistakes. Chief among them, in
the view of some, was the failure to recognize some of the important
implications of the current age of globalization, such as the erosion of
national borders, empowerment of nonstate actors and political
awakening of ordinary citizens around the world. These developments have
created problems such as terrorism, the threat of proliferation and
destabilizing revolutions that can be dealt with only through
multilateral cooperation. As Scowcroft puts it, "The decision by the
[Bush 43] administration to go in the opposite direction, and try and
deal with those problems as a unilateral nation-state using traditional
military power, is what brought America to the point of crisis."

One interpretation of the evolving narrative of American power is
that after periods of transformative upheaval brought about by crisis or
confrontation, the system ultimately self-corrects to a more
sustainable foreign policy bearing hallmarks of the
liberal-internationalist worldview. Something similar happened after the
revolutionary first terms of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, when the
foreign-policy pendulum eventually swung back to more realist
sensibilities during their second terms. In that view, the obvious
foreign-policy continuity between the second Reagan term and the George
H. W. Bush administration and between the second George W. Bush term and
the Obama administration may represent a sort of sweet spot between the
dynamic political tensions that shape America's role in the world.

Trying to explain American foreign policy by the various
"schools" of foreign-policy thought is ultimately too simplistic,
because modern American presidents have pursued a pretty consistent set
of general principles you might call "pragmatic idealism," which is
heavily guided both by American ideals but also by situational balances
of power,

said Robert Kagan, the neoconservative intellectual and author whose book, The World America Made, has been lauded by both Romney and Obama. He goes on:

We will have predictable arguments between different
foreign-policy camps that end predictably, but there is far more
continuity to U.S. foreign policy than the candidates and experts like
to acknowledge. That's why despite Obama's running as the polar opposite
of President Bush, Obama's foreign policy looks more like the Bush
administration's than almost anyone expected.

A more ominous interpretation of the current debate about American
power would view the steady disappearance of traditional realists and
liberal internationalists within the Republican Party as enduring. The
realist/internationalist wing of the party may be fading with the
passing of the Cold War generation of Republicans who championed it and
as a result of the party's shift toward the South and Mountain West.

"In terms of the division between the neoconservative and realist
wings of the Republican Party, I would argue that all of the
intellectual energy is on the neoconservative side," Elliot Abrams, a
deputy national-security adviser in the Bush 43 administration, told me
in a comment echoed by other prominent Republicans. "It's hard to think
of anyone below the age of forty who is pushing those ideas anymore.
Where is the next generation of Republican realists?"

If the Republican Party moves so far to the right that liberal
internationalists have no home other than with the Democrats, their
brand of international engagement and moderation risks becoming just
another political football tossed about in the partisan scrum of
Washington politics. In that case, U.S. foreign policy will continue to
vacillate wildly whenever power changes hands between the parties, the
congressional opposition will keep stubbornly obstructing the
president's foreign-policy initiatives out of a sense of duty and
ideology, and the perceived erosion in the quality of U.S. global
leadership will persist. Meanwhile, the ongoing quest for a bipartisan,
post-Cold War consensus on America's rightful role in the world will
remain quixotic. That's not a prescription for American exceptionalism
but rather a narrative of continued American decline.